ZOHAR TRANSLATION WATCH: Time Magazine has an article on Daniel Matt's project:

Found In Translation
An English version of the Zohar, a guiding text of Jewish mysticism, offers new insights
By DAVID VAN BIEMA/BERKELEY

Monday, Apr. 19, 2004
The road winds like a Talmudic discourse, first one way and then another, up toward Daniel Matt's home in the Berkeley, Calif., hills. "There's a more direct route that my wife likes," admits Matt, 53. "But I find this one more interesting."

That's not surprising. Matt is embarked on a solo journey through one of the most influential � and maddeningly difficult � works in the history of religious literature. After six years of his labor, Stanford University Press has published the first two books of his translation of the Zohar, the wellspring of Jewish mysticism, or Cabala. He will do nine more volumes, all rendered from the Zohar's original Aramaic. The work has received ecstatic advance reviews ("A superbly fashioned translation and a commentary that opens up the Zohar to the English-speaking world," blurbed lit-crit colossus Harold Bloom), and two weeks ago it won a $10,000 Koret Jewish Book Award for "monumental contribution to the history of Jewish thought." Beneath the praise runs an undercurrent of awe that someone was crazy enough to take on the job.

[...]

I'm not sure why the piece is dated next week. It looks pretty accurate overall, although I don't think it's correct to say that Aramaic was "a language Jews had not composed in for centuries" before Moses de Leon.

Also, congratulations to Professor Matt for the award.